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Two women who love the grass, two women who have both won the Wimbledon title. This could have been the 2014 final. It should have been the final. There have been too many mismatches over the years on the second Saturday. Too many two-set tussles that lasted barely long enough for the crowd to settle. Here, though, Venus Williams and Petra Kvitova kept on hitting, blasting, firing across Centre Court, and it felt as if it might last long into the night.

It was hardly an accident that this third-round contest had pedigree, a sense of occasion. Both competitors have